Building a developer portal using Backstage to unify all your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation to create a streamlined development environment from end to end.
Overview
As developers, we build products, applications, and portals for others to use. As the team grows in size, slowly it becomes more challenging to deliver high-quality code.
In this article, let’s go through Backstage. This is an open-source platform for building developer portals to enable product teams to quickly ship high-quality code without compromising autonomy.
Getting Started
Let’s get started by creating a standalone Backstage app.
npx @backstage/create-app
- For demonstration purposes, I use SQLite as the backend database. Other databases like PostgreSQL are supported.
- Once the application is created, run “
yarn dev” to start it. - You should be able to access the application at
localhost:3000
app-config.yaml
This is the main configuration of the application. From within this file, you can configure basic information like title, base URL, organization name, etc.
app:
title: A Developer Portal
baseUrl: http://localhost:3000organization:
name: Alpha2Phibackend:
baseUrl: http://localhost:7000
listen:
port: 7000
csp:
connect-src: ["'self'", 'http:', 'https:']
cors:
origin: http://localhost:3000
methods: [GET, POST, PUT, DELETE]
credentials: true
database:
client: sqlite3
connection: ':memory:'
cache:
store: memory
You will also notice by default github.com is configured as the GitHub provider, and a GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable is needed.
